Where is chief ouray buried

It was named the Ouray Reservation, after the now-famous chief. By the summer of , few Utes had agreed to relocate. As public pressure mounted on state and federal officials and the threat of forced removal became more real, Ouray made one final attempt to save his people from what he thought would be certain annihilation.

In August , at the age of forty-seven, he traveled to southwest Colorado to meet the defiant Southern Ute leader Ignacio , hoping to enlist his help in collecting signatures for the new peace agreement.

He fell terribly ill while on the Southern Ute reservation and died there on August 24, In the end, the Uncompahgre Utes were reluctant to leave their Colorado homelands for the reservation named after their fallen chief; when they finally did agree to leave the Uncompahgre valley, more than 1, US troops hovered behind them, ushering them along the mile journey to the new reservation.

The Southern Utes were allowed to stay in Colorado. Chipeta survived Ouray for thirty-four years, living in near poverty for the remainder of her life. The federal government never fully compensated Chipeta or finished the beautiful home she had been promised in the agreement.

She died on August 12, , at age eighty-one. She was buried in a traditional shallow grave. Like many other Indian leaders who lived to see their people pushed off their lands by whites, Ouray leaves a complicated legacy. His early life experiences in New Mexico, as well as his proximity to the Mexican-American War, gave him deep knowledge of how landed elites operated and an appreciation for US military power.

For the most part, Ouray deftly applied the knowledge gained in his early life in these situations, remaining skillfully defiant when he saw no threat to his people but capitulating to white interests when he perceived no other path but warfare and death. For better or worse, Ouray is remembered as a leader who unfailingly opted for peace in an otherwise violent and turbulent time. Today, the experiences and legacies of Ouray and Chipeta are chronicled in exhibits at the Ute Indian Museum in Montrose and in the minds and stories of the Ute people who live on the reservation bearing his name.

Steven G. Peter R. Albert B. Ute Indian Museum History Colorado. Today the only living person knowing he secret is Chief McCook , brother of Chipeta , who succeeded Ouray as chii f of tlie federated tribes. Chief McCook is past 80 and lives on the reservation. It was thru the friendliness of Ouray that there were no great wars with Indians in western Colorado. Tliis friendliness is Illustrated by an incident occurring when feeling against the whites was at its highest pitch. A dozen young braves were starting from the Indian camp to attack some early white settler.

Ouray remonstrated , saying : It is useless to fight the pale faces. They are as numerous as the stars in the sky , and cannot be counted. But the young warriors did not heed the advice , and raced away on their ponies. As a result, relations between the Indians and the whites deteriorated. Meeker, determined to convert the Ute from primitive savages to hard-working, God-fearing farmers, persisted in forcing his reforms, even when warned that he was making the Ute furious.

But Meeker ignored the warnings and ordered that a horse racing track be plowed under to convert to farmland. He also suggested to one that there were too many horses and that they would have to kill some of them. The Ute, whose land Meeker was plowing under, resisted and a fist-fight occurred. As a result, Meeker wired for military assistance, claiming that he had been assaulted by the Ute man, driven from his home, and severely injured.

The government responded by sending troops led by Major T. On September 29, , before the troops arrived, the Indians attacked the agency, burned the buildings, and killed Meeker and nine of his employees.

The incident is known as the Meeker Massacre. After the massacre, relief columns from Forts Fred Steele and D. Though Ouray had sent orders to the Ute band involved in the attacks to stop, his orders were ignored. Afterward, he did his best to keep the peace but it was too late.

To this day, they remain the only Ute tribal holdings in Colorado. Today, the Uintah and Ouray reservations in Utah are merged into a single reservation. More land would continue to be taken from the Utes until the mids, when U. It is believed there were about Utes in the early years of the nineteenth century. That number had been whittled down with their land holdings to fewer than by After government policies changed and Ute lands were no longer taken by whim, tribal governments became autonomous, eventually some land was won back in court, Ute farms became more productive, health gradually improved, and the population began to increase.

Today tribal numbers on the three reservations have returned to nearly their early nineteenth century levels. Longevity remains a dire problem, though, with life expectancy on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation being only a shockingly tragic forty years.

His body was buried in secret according to Ute custom by his people near Ignacio. His successor as treaty negotiator, Buckskin Charley Sapaiah — , and a brother-in-law, John McCook — , led a ceremony to re-inter his bones in the Ignacio cemetery in May After being relocated with the other northern Ute bands to the Ouray Reservation in Utah, Chipeta remained a force among the Utes for the next four decades.

She continued to be well-respected and even to be celebrated among both the Utes and the whites, and became known for her advocacy for Indian rights.